1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and method for expanding skin, and more particularly, to an apparatus and method for expanding skin which expands autologous skin of the body's outside to the maximum extent to allow culturing of skin tissue.
2. Discussion of Related Art
Generally, skin is one of the organs in a human body and occupies about 16% of the entire body weight. Skin is in direct contact with outside environment and serves a function of protecting a human body from the outside. For example, skin acts as an anatomical barrier against external substances such as pathogens.
In addition, skin provides a semi-permeable barrier that prevents excessive loss of body fluids as well as preventing essential nutrients from being washed away from the body. Other functions of skin may include insulation, regulation of body temperature and sensation.
The skin may be damaged by burns, injuries, disease, depigmentation such as leukoplakia, or the like, and in such cases, the skin damage may be recovered by skin-grafting.
Such a skin-grafting surgery is referring to taking a skin graft from another area, grafting, and suturing at a surgical site with a loss of skin tissue that cannot be closed up by primary suturing and is an essential surgery for cases such as correction of contractures and cicatrices by injuries such as burns, removal of skin tumors and skin ulcers, reconstruction of soft tissue in finger inosculations, etc.
However, in such skin-grafting surgeries, a secondary damage and scar may occur at an area from which the skin is taken, and the surgery may become difficult in cases where the area from which the skin is taken is very small due to prior burns or injuries. Thus, other artificial skin or expanded skin from a small area of skin is used for skin-grafting.
Conventional skin-grafting surgeries may be classified as grafting of artificial skin, grafting using an implantable tissue expander, and a mesh graft, etc. The grafting of artificial skin is a surgery involving grafting an artificially synthesized or cultured skin substitute and needs to be accompanied by grafting of another piece of autologous tissue and limited by short falls in physical properties, expensive cost, a lack of permanency, vulnerability to infections, biological incompatibility, and the like.
Meanwhile, the grafting using an implantable tissue expander is performing surgery after inserting a skin expander in the body to inflate and expand tissues, which is advantageous in terms of using autologous tissues, however requires a lot of time for securing a sufficient quantity of tissues, causes difficulties for daily life, and is not possible to be applied to a body part for which fiberizing of tissue is not suitable.
In addition, the mesh graft surgery is a method of grafting in which a skin graft to be grafted is stretched to a form of mesh using a tool but requires a very long time for recovering the injury, aggravates cicatrices and contractures of the skin, and requires a lot quantity of autologous skin. That is, a skin-grafting surgery capable of minimizing damage and scarring of the donor site, an inadequacy of immunity, and a risk of infection is necessary, and in this connection, an apparatus for expanding skin is necessary which stretches a skin graft of a minimal area collected from a donor site with a certain amount of force at the outside of the body to expand and culture the skin graft to a maximum area possible for the recipient site. A method is necessary for expanding an autologous skin graft to be applied to an affected area of the patient to the maximum extent possible without rupturing the skin by applying an algorithm of expanding skin to the maximum depending on skin conditions of individual patients, skin graft sites to be collected, and expansion environments.